Rake at the Compton Arms

The Compton Arms is old enough to have inspired George Orwell’s essay on the ideal pub, and its current kitchen residency — trading as Rake — is exactly the kind of serious, slightly eccentric cooking that reputation deserves.

Residencies at this pub have a habit of building genuine followings before eventually moving on, and Rake has continued that pattern rather than broken it: a young kitchen team given a historic room and a short lease, using both to cook with more ambition than the setting might suggest at first glance.

This review is aimed at the specific question anyone tucked down Compton Avenue tends to ask: is a residency this changeable worth the same 4-star rating a fixed kitchen would need years to earn?

The Room

A genuinely old backstreet pub, unpretentious and low-key, tucked down a residential street that gives no obvious sign from the outside of either its literary history or its current kitchen. Inside, it’s exactly what a good backstreet London pub should be — worn surfaces, a proper bar, regulars who were coming here long before any food residency arrived and will likely still be coming after this one ends.

The food operation slots into that existing character rather than displacing it; you can still come in for just a pint, and plenty of people do, sitting at the bar entirely unaware of the more ambitious cooking coming out of the kitchen a few feet away.

What to Order

Deep-fried cockles on skewers are the dish most people mention first, a genuinely unusual bar snack executed with real care rather than treated as a novelty. Oysters rarebit takes a classic British pub standard and layers it with a briny, seafood-forward twist that shouldn’t work as well as it does.

Ray wing tenders on a crumpet is the kitchen’s most obviously inventive dish, an odd-sounding combination on paper that reads, once it arrives, as a considered piece of British bar cooking rather than a gimmick. Half a roast chicken with chips and curry mayo is the more straightforward, crowd-pleasing order for anyone who wants a proper meal rather than a run of snacks — and it’s cooked with the same attention as the stranger dishes around it.

The Drinks List

A straightforward pub list, built to sit alongside the food rather than lead it — real ale on tap for the pub’s existing regulars, and a small, sensible wine selection for anyone eating the fuller menu. Nobody’s trying to sell you a natural-wine list here; the drinks are in service of the pub, not the kitchen residency layered on top of it.

That restraint feels deliberate rather than an oversight — a wine programme this modest, in a pub this historically low-key, would be the wrong note to strike even if the food underneath it is more ambitious than the surroundings suggest.

What You Will Pay

Around £30–40 per person, which for cooking this considered, in a genuinely historic room, is excellent value — this remains, first and foremost, a pub, and the pricing reflects that rather than the ambition of what’s coming out of the kitchen. A couple of snacks and a pint can come in well under that if you’re not committing to a full sitting, which suits a room built as much for a casual drop-in as for a planned dinner.

The Verdict

Come knowing the kitchen residency may change in a year or two — that’s part of what keeps this pub interesting, and it’s worth visiting on the strength of what’s currently on the menu rather than waiting for a “permanent” version that this particular pub has never really offered. Go for the cockles regardless of whoever’s cooking when you arrive.

What’s Being Said

Orwell would have recognised the pub; the kitchen behind it now is a genuinely modern addition, and one that’s earned its place rather than simply been bolted onto a famous address for the novelty of the connection. Residencies like this live or die on whether the cooking justifies the setting — this one does, and it’s worth visiting on that basis alone rather than purely for the literary trivia attached to the building.